paleontology
clock | March 19, 2007Jurassic Crocodile Is Unearthed From Blue Mountains In Eastern Oregon:
An ancient sea-going crocodile has surfaced from the rocks of Crook County in eastern Oregon. Really. It's discovery by the North American Research Group (NARG), whose members were digging for Jurassic-age mollusks known as ammonites, is another confirmation that the Blue Mountains consist of rocks that traveled from somewhere in the Far East, says retired University of Oregon geologist William Orr, who was called in to examine the find for the state.
clock | February 6, 2007I was just about to write about this story, but Grrrrl scoooped me and summarized it so well, I'll just ask you to go there.
Oh, btw, it is about an incredible discovery of about one hundred dinosaur eggs and some tracks around them.
clock | January 24, 2007I love it when Archy blogs about mammoths and the latest post is perhaps his best yet!
clock | December 8, 2006Did mammoths scratch themselves against rocks?
Parkman believes, and he has a growing body of evidence to prove that mammoths and other large Ice Age creatures once used these very rocks near Duncan's Landing, along the Sonoma Coast State Beach, to scratch their backs. He claims the giant mammals rubbed so much that large swaths of rock have been buffered smooth.
Bears scratch against the trees, but which species is which? Lumpers vs. Splitters.
clock | November 4, 2006I took a class with Dale Russell a few years ago. It was one of the most memorable classes ever, mainly because of Dale's overwhelming enthusiasm for the subjects of dinosaurs and evolution (as well as the coolest field-trip to the vaults of Carnegie Museum, getting to touch and hold and discuss fossils never seen by general public).
But I was always uneasy with Dale's overly-anthropomorphic depiction of 'alternative' evolution, i.e., what if dinosaurs did not go extinct. First of all, there is no reason to believe that anything as intelligent as us would ever have evolved. But even if it…
clock | October 5, 2006Norwegian scientists have discovered a "treasure trove" of fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs.
The 150 million-year-old fossils were uncovered on the Arctic island chain of Svalbard - about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.
The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles - the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs.
One skeleton has been nicknamed The Monster because of its enormous size.
The Monster is an 8m long pliosaur with a most complete skeleton of such an animal ever found:
Read the details...
clock | October 4, 2006Archy has totally switched from mammoths (and Republicans) to mastodons. He explains the news on the tuberculosis in their bones and what that has to do with their extinction.
clock | September 24, 2006When you are hungry for news about mammoths, you go and visit Archy, of course. But this time, he moves sideways to take a look at mastodons, hippos and Ken Hamm. And the tail, or whatever that is....
clock | September 16, 2006The phrase "Living Fossil" is second to only "Missing Link" on my list of irks-me-to-no-end abuses of English language. Darren Naish now explains exactly what is wrong with the term, using as the case study the recent rediscovery of the Sumatran rhino. This is your Most Obligatory reading of the day!
clock | September 15, 2006Paleontologists Find 67 Dinosaurs In One Week:
He was specifically looking for Psittacosaurus fossils because it was a very common dinosaur and would give him lots of specimens, Horner said. It would also keep away poachers and commercial fossil hunters who work in the area, but prefer rare fossils. Horner wants a large number of fossils so he can compare variations between skeletons and changes during growth.
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The paleontologists found two meat-eating fossils in Mongolia in addition to the Psittacosaurus, Horner said. One of them looked like a raptor and may…
clock | August 15, 2006Archy is on top of the story, as usual when the story is about people trying to resurrect mammoths!
clock | August 10, 2006The find of a knife flake together with a mammoth dated at 16,000 yo, spurs new speculations about pre-Clovis humans in the Americas. This is the clearest description I ever found of a possible alternative hypothesis to Bering-Clovis.
clock | July 26, 2006If you are interested in mammoths, or if mammoths make the news, the first place to go is Archy: WOOLLY MAMMOTH LINKED TO SCIENCE FRAUD!!!
clock | July 16, 2006Do you read Darren Naish's blog Tetrapod Zoology? If not, you should start now. Just check out some of the most recent posts, for example this two-parter on sea snakes: 'A miniature plesiosaur without flippers': surreal morphologies and surprising behaviours in sea snakes and Sea kraits: radical intraspecific diversity, reproductive isolation, and site fidelity.
Or, this two-part post about the importance of the shape of the birds' bills: The war on parasites: a pigeon's eye view and The war on parasites: an oviraptorosaur's eye view.
Or an amazing four-part story about Angloposeidon, a…
clock | June 15, 2006The Aquatic Ape theory is bunk, but Aquatic Sparrow theory just got a huge boost. There is no way I can explain the Big Evolution News Of The Day as well as Grrrlscientist did, so please go here and enjoy the amazing news of the wading/aquatic ancestors of all modern birds, with the beuatiful pictures of excuisitely well-preserved fossils from China.
grrlscientist | June 15, 2006
Artist's rendition of Gansus yumenensis
on a lake in Changma Basin, China approximately 115-110 million years ago.
Illustration: Mark A. Klingler / CMNH.
In 1984, a paper was published in China (in Chinese) that described a new bird species from the early Cretaceous period, based on part of a fossilized left foot bone that had been discovered in northwestern China by a team of paleoichthyologists in 1981. This bone was determined to be part of an ancient tern-sized bird, later named Gansus yumenensis (for the Chinese province of Gansu, and Yumen, the nearest somewhat large town to where…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2006Everyone knows that the dinosaurs went extinct after a giant meteorite smashed into earth 65 million years ago, creating a huge dent in the planet's surface just off the Yucatan peninsula, but did you know that there was an earlier, even more dramatic, mass extinction event? That apocalyptic event occurred approximately 252 million years ago, at the Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary, and it wiped out nearly 95% of all living species on earth, but unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction, the PT mass extinction cause(s) remain mysterious. In his book, Extinction: How Life Nearly Ended…
clock | June 9, 2006Hey, I just came here - don't even know where the bathroom is, yet the SEED overlords are already making demands - the "Ask the ScienceBlogger" question of the week. At least they picked a relatively easy one for us rookies this week - no need for a two-part post of 4000 words each, written after hours of research on the topic....Here it is:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Something outdoors. Anything outdoors! Get me out of the house and lab, please! Now!
If I was not…
clock | June 9, 2006You may have noticed a button on my sidebar (under the heading "I Support") that looks like this:
If you click on it, you will be transported to the homepage of one of my favourite science educational programs - the Project Exploration. This project is the brainchild of paleontologist Paul Sereno and his wife, historian and educator Gabrielle Lyons.
More under the fold....
If you do not know who Paul Sereno is, you are probably not interested in dinosaurs at all, as he is the #1 Big Star of Dinosaur Paleontology. Among else, he has discovered Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, one of the…